Great user experiences start with fast content

Great user experiences start with fast content

  • By Jay |

I generally have zero tolerance for slow web page load times – I mean don’t we all? But regardless of how content-rich your website may be, there are some relatively simple ways to optimize for a great user experience.

In my last blog, I shared some compelling statistics that support the need for maintaining the fastest websites possible and provided an explanation of how a browser’s web request receives content served up by the application server and the content delivery network (CDN). Next up, we get into a bit of Webscale’s secret sauce – our automated content optimization techniques that ensure your website is “always on” and always running at its peak performance.

Think of automated content optimization like embarking upon a complex project. Rather than overwhelm yourself with trying to do too many things at the same time, you break the project down into smaller, more manageable projects. Where possible, you delegate responsibilities to other available resources to improve overall efficiencies.

Well, that essentially is what Webscale’s automated content optimization does in the ADC layer, by reducing the number and size of requests from the browser, that have to be fulfilled to the user.

In addition, Webscale application acceleration automatically modifies static assets in the CDN (and we work across a number of commodity CDNs), by caching, resizing images or minifying javascript, for example. When these optimizations are performed before delivery to the user, the end result is faster load times and a stellar user experience.

This is all especially important for mobile workloads. The same techniques, reducing overall page size and the number of server requests, maximize the performance of your website for mobile where bandwidth limitations and device specification can have dramatic impacts on performance.

Check out the whiteboard video below for the walkthrough, and check back for my next post, where I’ll talk more about how to get improved visibility into your infrastructure.

Jay

Jay lives in the mountains outside of Boulder with his wife and three kids. He loves to cook and chase bears with his dog Ginger. When not chasing bears, Jay works with a talented group of friends building Webscale.